“There is no doubt that demographically, the 21st Century is going to be more religious than the 20th Century because the more religious you are, the larger the family you have. And that's happening throughout the world. So even if the religious do not persuade a single skeptic or atheist, they’re nonetheless going to be much more in evidence throughout the world. And I don’t think people have really anticipated this,” says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
Dividing the world into saints and sinners, the saved and the damned, the children of God and the children of the devil, is the first step down the road to violence in the name of God, says the Rabbi in his book, “Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence”. Sacks says religion is, “I think it’s absolutely fundamental, certainly in the Middle East, certainly in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and certainly in parts of Asia. And nobody expected this because for the last three centuries, every self-respecting Western intellectual has been predicting that religion was in intensive care and soon to leave humanity altogether. So this is really unexpected. But what we are seeing is, after a set of failed secular ideologies and, in the Middle East, secular nationalisms, a set of religious counterrevolutions that are combining religion with politics in the most destructive way.”
Sacks says his book is, “…dedicated to religious people. It is written as a religious book. So much of the critique of Islam today comes from a secular perspective. So much of the criticism of religion has come from fundamentalist atheists who are every bit as angry as some of their religious extremist counterparts. I’m not saying they commit acts of violence, but they do regard everyone who disagrees with them as less than fully sane. And what I’ve tried to do is to speak in a religious language to show people that tolerance is not a matter of religious compromise.”
Sack says much of our problem is in the way we read the texts, “Genesis is structured around a series of sibling rivalries – Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers and the two sisters, Leah and Rachel. And what I’ve argued is, a superficial reading of those stories always says there’s a chosen one and a rejected one. But actually, it’s not hard to see if you, without any preconceptions, read the story…. For instance, of the birth of Isaac, when Sarah says to Abraham, send away that slave woman and her son, Ishmael and we see Hagar and her child, Ishmael, going out into the desert in the midday sun – their water supply runs out. They’re both about to die. Hagar can’t bear to see her son, Ishmael, about to die. And there is no way that you can read that story without your heart going out to Hagar and to Ishmael….In other words, our sympathies are enlisted not for the chosen but for the other, the apparently rejected one. And you can see that in all those stories. So what you are seeing is that on the surface, these are stories of God choosing X and rejecting Y. But read seriously from a position of some maturity, we can see that God’s choice is not like that. His love is not like that. To love X, he doesn’t have to hate Y. To choose X, he doesn’t have to reject Y…In other words, the very theologies that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have at their roots and that, of course, such violence between them through the centuries may actually be the wrong way of reading those texts.”
Sacks says he is not trying to “reform” militants or suggesting to them that they read his book and change their views, but is trying to at least educate a “secular” world, the intellectual people. “If we read our sacred texts correctly, that is what God is calling us to do,” says Sacks, a truth that holds for all people across religions.
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